After seeing this regional, I think that the higher-ups at FIRST over estimated how much banging around the bumpers would compensate for when making and enforcing the rules. After that last match we spent about half an hour banging on our robot trying to return it to something close to its original shape, and we’re a team with 15 years of FIRST experience and a very solid chassis. There are rookie teams that given that 2 on 1 type of abuse would have been left as a pile of bolts on the field, and that really isn’t what the game is about.
On a side note I don’t think playing “Na-Na-Nahh-Na, Na-Na-Nahh-Na, Hey, Hey, Hey…Goodbye” with a large portion of the audience singing along and waving their hands after a team is eliminated from the competition is really part of what FIRST is all about either, and that happened multiple times today.
-Brendan